# Programmer Rant - Why can't most of us offer a decent support?
Hey everyone,
today I want to talk about a topic which makes me very mad and sad at the same time.
In the last years as a developer, I noticed that the worst possible customer support you can get is the support by programmers themselves.
In whatever kind of project I worked until now I always tried to offer the best possible support to all of my users
since I really want to make people with my creations happy and I want as many people using my work as possible.
This makes sense since if no one uses it, I wasted my time on this project.
And, in all those years I always received a lot of praise for my work, people were usually extremely happy with the support I offered them
and often, also because of that, decided to support my projects and tell other people about them.
But, In the last year, I went through some situations which left me really mad.
And I want to use this post to reflect about those situations and, I hope that as many programmers as possible will read this and might reflect their
behavior to improve this situation.
Okay, let's start with something that started a few months ago and peaked yesterday.
Minecolonies has some compatibility problems with another mod, where there is, unfortunately, no workaround on our side.
Therefore, I opened an issue on their Github, which didn't end up resolving it and tried to contact them on their Irc and discord.
Unfortunately, this never resulted in anything, since no one ever responded there.
So, yesterday this peaked when I decided to go to their discord again.
I arrived there and asked them about the issue, a few minutes passed by and my question was 2 pages behind already.
I looked at the hotbar of online users and saw that around 20 staff people were listed as online. I looked at one who seems to be fitting and actually online and decided to ping him to ask him for support.
You don't want to imagine the shitstorm that broke out after that where, funnily not the admin himself, but his friendly footsoldiers started trying to teach me that pinging someone is completely inappropriate behavior.
End of the story, out of the nothing our issue raised interest and a PR was created which will resolve this in the future and I had to ask myself if all this trouble couldn't have been avoided at the first time.
What could we learn from this?
a) When you're a dev and you offer a communication channel, prepare to be pinged, that's when the channel is for
b) When you are on the communication channel prepare to be questioned and prepare to answer politely, or just offer github issues if you are not able to communicate politely.
Another situation arose a few weeks ago, I went again on a discord of a Mod which had severe issues on our server.
I arrived there and asked if there was anyone here to give me support.
The first thing I got was a "Sigh" of one of the mod devs and I immediately thought to my self "That's starting well already pal".
I told him the situation and he said: "Yes, not my fault, lib x I use breaks that every now and then, wait for an update".
So I asked him, if there is no workaround or anything else he can do since if his dependency breaks this now or then, he might even put up a switch in his code to resolve this problem in the future, but he was not interested at all in doing anything about it.
What could we learn from this?
If you create a software and you want to maintain it, really maintain it, if something you do, often breaks in connection with other dependencies - either try to contact them to resolve this or try to build a workaround in your code. Because if you don't do this, just stop this project right there, your software will probably cause more headache than help anyone in many cases and its just not worth continuing here.
But that's not all, another mod caused issues on our server, basically allowing any player to duplicate blocks, grief others, or just be OP in general.
Therefore, we contacted the mod author and asked him kindly, if it would be possible to implement a configuration in this mod to allow server owners to disable certain aspects. The answer was fast "No, it's like that because I want it that way, the end user is not always right" and "I don't care if a f** server uses my mod or not".
What could we learn from this?
If you code something and let people use it, you should ask yourself whether you code it for yourself or for the end users? If you code it for the end users -> Who should you listen to? - The End-user, especially when it's about configurations!
These situations I described above were just the top of the mountain of what I had to work with the past year and it's actually really sad and it had me raise the following questions.
- Do most of us programmers really think they're superior to the rest?
- Don't they care if what they spend many hours of work with is really used?
- Don't they care if people are happy with what they create?
We have to be careful with what we do, at the moment there are not a lot of programmers out there, but if we don't learn how to deal with other people, companies won't be very happy with our service, even if the code is perfect and a new gigantic generation of future coders is just waiting to pass you on your career ladder.
Besides that, employers lose averagely 22 minutes per day just dealing with computer related issues, that makes us programmers, if we don't do things right, also a bottleneck for company progress [1].
Since 22 minutes per day, are easily 2 work weeks a year lost just because we programmers didn't think of the end user when doing something.
I hope you guys agree with me on this one.
See you the next time.
[1] https://www.employtest.com/news/how-much-time-are-your-employees-wasting-on-computer-issues
In whatever kind of project I worked until now I always tried to offer the best possible support to all of my users
Every programmer must realize that at the end it all depends on how it sells - and the programmers are the best advocates for it. If we do not provide the best possible support (which we only can do, as we know in and out of it having programmed it), then it will be soon things of the past.
Well said.
I certainly agree with what you're saying here, however, in some cases, you can understand how people(programmers) feel. It happens all too often where users blame configuration without any comprehension of how everything is pieced together and how it works, where it ends up as an issue on the user end instead. Personally I always do my best to explain to them how it works, but some people are remarkably arrogant. I'm not trying to defend poor support, but I feel people should at least try to make an effort to understand their own end before starting up a screaming contest because things aren't going their way. In the end, if you're responsible for supporting the people that use your application, don't be a complete asshole towards the people that ultimately are responsible for your salary.
I had an amazing experience a while back with support from a group of programmers that are responsible for the decryption application that my banking system uses for monthly reports. There was an issue with a dependency that they use after upgrading to Fedora 26 from 25, they deprecated the dependency completely. I sent them a mail asking whether they are aware of the issue, and if not would they be so kind to provide a solution. It wasn't even 10 minutes later and I received a professional response from one of them telling me that they have taken note of the issue, and will be working on a solution. Two days later they were kind enough to send me the updated application before it was even publicly released, and asked that I report any issues to them if I find any.
Well, we, developers, certainly aren't the most people-friendly bunch in the world.
I have learned so far that many of us have quite profound issues with our assertiveness, maturity, sense of ownership and/or responsibility for things we own. Many of those issues are masked with bloated ego or bad attitude.
I never expect a decent support from an open source project. This makes it a nice surprise if there is one, but in general I am aware what cost is associated with a proper product support. If someone runs the project out of hours, spending time dealing with people asking for something may be seen as a loss of time for coding. An inexperienced developer may not understand what gives his software value so it is a trap very easy to fall into.
Overall, people you dealt with behaved badly. They should have given some feedback within decent timing (a week, let's say), they should have taken ownership for their projects' reliability (if one uses an unreliable dependency and does not defend against this, one is unreliable) and treated others as equals instead of what they did. These people seem like wrong people in the wrong place.
I'm too spoiled, I try to give a customer support as good as possible and get disappointed if I don't get the same in return =D
It's very good that you have the maturity in your approach, but it's not justified to expect the same in return elsewhere. If you pay - it's different. If it's open source - well, people are people, with all their shortcomings. They may need some time to get there. It may be longer than their lifetime.
Like I noted in my post, I'm not mad if people don't offer a communication channel for support for open source project, as its an open source project and not everyone has the time. But, if it is available, and the person is there, I ask to be treated correctly, and I'd be happy already with a "Currently I don't have the time, but I'll definitely put it on my list".
I know, you are right :)
This reminds me of a one comedy settled in the seventies in a Polish village: one of the characters had a bathroom in the house because one of the neighbours had it and she didn't want to be worse, but it was neither used nor maintained, and everyone used the loo outside ;)
Maybe it's one of those "we have to, we can't be worse than others"case.
That's why you have in professional support 3 levels. First and second in direct contact with the customer and 3rd as development. And never in direct contact. But this is expensive. So most avoid it at all and set someone in first level who was never trained for human contact:)
Thanks for sharing your experience. People don't actually realise that even if you have very few bugs and errors in your product but your customer service is terrible, then your product is bound to fail because people won't let anyone treat them bad and are likely to reject that product with such attitude.
I have been working in customer service for quite some time and know from experience that people will endure most of the errors, bugs and faults, as long as you let them know they are valued and appreciated. As long as you keep praising customers and doing them favours, they will recommend your product and be happy because they were treated well.
hmmm, that's a bummer dude, i'm not a developer but i've recently come to understand more about github and utopian // much respect to everyone keeping the steem blockchain and features up and running 24 / 7 , it is a cool world that's being crafted / peace
Sadly yes some programmers think they know it all in reality they don't. The best programmers listen to feedback and collaborate with others because when it comes to coding, most of the time the more minds that are on the project the better the project becomes. That is why open source projects are so appealing to people.
Yes,Good
Hey @mhalaf I think it would be way more productive to write a longer comment, maybe explaining your own experiences and writing what exactly you liked. Short comments like that will get you nowhere but flagged.
I've been following you a bit and honestly you're a pretty rad dude. Keep it up please!!
raycoms!! Thank you, your Post.